“Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces

"Itchycoo Park" came out on Immediate on 4 August 1967, and it's Small Faces at their most sunstruck, a slice of psychedelic pop by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, who produced it themselves with Glyn Johns at the desk. Its calling card is flanging, the whooshing, jet-plane swoop that engineers of the day had to coax out of electro-mechanical trickery, and it makes the whole record shimmer like heat haze.

It climbed to number three at home and gave them their only top-forty hit in America, where it landed on There Are But Four Small Faces rather than on any British album. It went all the way to number one in Canada and New Zealand. A reissue in December 1975 sent it back to number nine in the UK , and it often gets the credit for bringing the band back together in the mid-'70s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.